Does Organizer Transition Gracefully To New Computer?

Last year, I spent hours getting all my photos and digital scrapbooking supplies carefully organized in Picasa 3. I loved the many ways I could find my files and carefully backed up my Picasa files to an external hard drive. When the motherboard on my almost two-year old computer died, the warranty provided for a new computer. Great, however, I could never get the Picasa files to come forward properly to the new computer. With the move, I had placed some folders and files in a different location than on the old computer so that may be partially responsible, but I couldn't get anything to come forward so all those hours were lost.

Given my disappointing experience with transitioning Picasa work to a new computer, I wondered if people have been happy with their PSE Organizer catagories being retained when one upgrades to a newer software version or you move to a new computer? I can do a certain amount of searching just in Windows Explorer since most designers are good about including key words in their file names (say, blue, paper, Christmas, etc.), but I know that I'm missing a lot of files with that method. I just don't want to invest hours yet again in getting everything properly tagged/organized, only to potentially lose it all in a couple of years.

I'm not a PSE user, but I know it can be done. My husband built a new computer for one of our friends who uses the PSE organizer to tag his photos. We did a little online research, found the correct folder on his old system and just copied it to the new system. We also installed a newer version of PSE and it all worked just fine.

Thanks so much. A few years back I had upgraded from PSE 4 to 5 and the Organizer seemed to bring everything forward without an issue, however, that was an upgrade on the same computer vs. having to move to a totally new computer with a different operating system.